Online Presence

Within the past year Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has been in the spotlight and in court because of Facebook's privacy policies and how people's private information has been leaked. Hackers have been using Facebook to try and get people's information by making them "sign in" to Facebook again. People would type in their email and password and basically just give their information to the hackers. In class, we learned about our online presence and how much information about us is on the internet. We had to look up ourselves on google and see what came up. When I googled myself almost all my pictures from my Instagram page were there. My LinkedIn photo was there as well as some other pictures I have uploaded to Facebook. I was amazed to see a lot of my pictures there since my account is private on Instagram. I do not have a personal website and this is my only blog account so I was very surprised. Most of my pictures that I post on Instagram I also attach the location of where the picture is and I think that is why most of them popped up on google. Not from my account specifically, but from the location tag. If someone was looking me up or looking at my social media accounts I think they would only find pictures. They would not find any of personal information but they can also see where I have been from my location tags. They would also see that I am from New York and that I attend High Point University but not my phone number or my email on the main platforms I use. I have only given out my email and phone number on LinkedIn for obvious reasons but I do not post it on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. I use my email to log in to those platforms but I do not voluntarily hand it out. I think social media makes lonely people more lonely because they try and interact with people online and I grew up being very cautious about who I talk to online, making sure that I know them and they are not sketchy weirdos. I also think that people use social media to not feel lonely and they show off more than they have. Maybe they post pictures of somewhere they did not go just to seem they are out and about. Other people though post pictures to show you what they are doing and what they like. So I do think social media makes people who are already lonely even more lonely but for me I think it is a great place to post pictures to show other people what you are doing and enjoying it.